Stateline Canberra

Map Marvels

The marvellous worlds of maps and mapping - Martin Woods from the National Library talks about their fascinating collection.

This is longer version than the interview which went to air.

MARTIN WOODS (Senior Curator of Maps, National Library)I'm here in the rare maps room. Today I'm going to show you one of the many treasures we have here, but a particularly special one that we picked out for you.

This is a very special item in the library's collections for several reasons. One of the reasons and probably the most important one is that there are only five hand drawn maps of Australia by the Dutch. The Dutch as we know, chartered a great deal of the Australian coastline - particularly Western Australia and South Australia and the north, but um, very little is left in Australian hands. And what we've now got is two maps here of the Western Australian coastline that tell the story of Willem de Vlamingh's voyage here in 1697.

The Dutch were all over the East Indies. They had bases in Batavia and throughout what we now know as Indonesia, and they were looking for spices. The Spice Islands were a licence to mint money for the Dutch and they were looking for more commerce further south. They had found a new way to the East Indies along the roaring 40'S and unfortunately some of them wrecked on the Western Australian coastline. Vlamingh's job in 1697 was to map in detail the Western Australian coastline, so that no more of these wrecks would happen.

So what we've got here now is 1500km of highly detailed charting for the time. Even these insets here of Rottnest, very detailed, showing all the soundings and shoals and depths that are needed for any navigator or sailor to avoid the dangers that had beset all the previous voyages.

They spent a lot of time trying to make contact with the local aboriginal population but failed dismally. They struggled to find water, but they did manage to map the coastline so I think that was their great success.

They did spend three days inland along the swan river and over here we have an inset of the Swan River mouth, very different from as it is today, however a great deal of detail, it tells us of the Swan River as it was at the time.

So we have no other record of the Swan River other than this.

Moving further up the coast, Vlamingh chartered Shark Bay, revisited Dirk Hartog island and of course there's the famous story that every Western Australian will know, that Vlamingh replaced Dirk Hartog's plate with one of his own and that this plate now resides in the Western Australian maritime museum.

The map says the Southland of New Holland. By the 1690's, the Dutch had, in name at least, taken possession of Australia and called it New Holland. It was known to the English as New Holland, and this map records that information. It was of course never taken up by the Dutch, and the Dutch East India company went out of business by about 1800, and it was left to the British and Cook, as we know, to pick up the east coast.

Vlamingh's story was a tragic one in one sense. They spent just 2 months here, they were here to prevent wrecks. He succeeded in charting the coastline, but didn't succeed in his other mission which was to find spices, or gold, or riches, or people to trade with. The local people avoided him at every opportunity. Whenever they were sighted, all they found were smoking campfires and huts, abandoned footmarks in the sand. Only once did they ever sight a group...A substantial group...of aboriginal people. So it's no wonder when he left, his first officer's said "this most desolate land". They'd not found water, whenever they landed they were faced with high cliffs they just seemed to be incredibly unlucky. And this is, in essence, the story of the Dutch in Australia.

Why was it done so, in so much details? This is a puzzle for the library, and there are a few puzzles. We know we had this map in 1911, but we don't know how the collector - E.A. Petherick - who collected and donated many maps to the library - came by it. And only recently has that come to light. Last year we did more research on the map collection because it was 400 years of Dutch mapping of Australia and a very alert researcher pointed out some work that had been done on the cartographer Gerard van Keulen. So we were able to piece together that Petherick had picked up this map when the van Keulen company went out of business in 1885, and so this now tells us at least where it came from. We were also able to find out that it's a hand drawn map. This was the clincher for us in identifying it as a highly valuable treasure and perhaps one of the most valuable treasures in the library.

The map's been in the library's collection for nearly 100 years - possibly under appreciated and under valued. But we now know a little more of it's long journey...A journey that's possibly as difficult as Vlamingh's own journey to Australia.

Obviously not everybody can come and visit the library, there are 15, 000 of these rare maps that we're aware of and 400 atlases, that we hold here...And we have a lot of visitors, but we're now trying to photograph as much as we can of the collection so that everybody can use the maps. They tell us a lot about Australia, about its history, who we are, who we were, and perhaps who we might be over time.